Amber Sea

By Lance W Marker

Life can exist anywhere. As long as you keep it secret. An interplanetary civilization of the dead should be the best kept secret of all - providing you choose your victims wisely.

On the raised surface of Venus a secret narco civilization is tunnelling its way to independence from Earth. Outside is dangerous, but a thousand more years of venera-forming will allow free-breathing settlement in the amber sea swirling around the planet.

But Venus carries a secret. A parallel Earth of trafficked humans emerges where it shouldn't exist. Enter Mei, a paternal orphan, and Maddox, a smuggler on the run. They settle the scores of their ancestors. In doing so they draw the line between hero and villain so sharp that it threatens to end life on Venus and transform the solar system forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lance W Marker
• Release date: Dec 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781068588846

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Table of Contents

Amber Sea

Amber Sea

1: Home

2: Exile

3: Empire

4: Exile

5: Empire

6: Exile

7: Empire

8: Exile

9: Empire

9: Home

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Life can exist anywhere. As long as you keep it secret. An interplanetary civilization of the dead should be the best kept secret of all - providing you choose your victims wisely.

On the raised surface of Venus a secret narco civilization is tunnelling its way to independence from Earth. Outside is dangerous, but a thousand more years of venera-forming will allow free-breathing settlement in the amber sea swirling around the planet.

But Venus carries a secret. A parallel Earth of trafficked humans emerges where it shouldn’t exist. Enter Mei, a paternal orphan, and Maddox, a smuggler on the run. They settle the scores of their ancestors. In doing so they draw the line between hero and villain so sharp that it threatens to end life on Venus and transform the solar system forever.

Amber Sea

Book One of the Psychworld Trilogy

Lance W Marker

ESTELLA PUBLISHING

Copyright © Lance W Marker 2024

All Rights Reserved

ISBN (electronic book) 978-1-0685888-4-6

Phoenix – Tuvalu – Phoenix

Light horizontal

1: Home

Mei did not believe in living in the past. Since she was about to follow in her dead father’s footsteps to Mars, this had become something of a problem. Luckily, as she descended the stairwell to the underground chamber beneath the Tuvalu seabed, she was reminded that this was just a simulation. Nobody was going to Mars.

‘We’re going to lock you down now. Enjoy’.

Mei looked up to the voice and saw Tyler’s smile vanish behind the hub sliding over the stairwell. It slammed shut with the same finality as her mom’s teapot lid two weeks ago. Hoi refused to listen. She jolted boiling water into her teapot, as if the teabags were to blame for her daughter’s stupid decision to dig up the past and disappear for six months.

Mei had barely got to know any of the other passengers beyond her roommates. She could never figure the rationale behind the Psychworld plan. Why did they insist on getting volunteers exclusively from Phoenix? Was it a grim fraction of the two thousand lost with her dad almost twenty years ago? Were two hundred people, out of a city of two million, supposed to know each other, or to share a sense of community? Unlikely. During initiation Mei in fact noticed that she was amongst strangers. There seemed to be nobody else from her university. All the other candidates were roommates in their twenties. They were also all households. It was all or nothing. Psychworld had rejected volunteers who shared their homes unless all their other roommates were on board, too.

The beds in the spaceship simulation were comfortable modules spaced out in diagonal mezzanine plots. As Mei lay down, the pods seemed less claustrophobic. The wall to her right was lined with a computer terminal. The bed folded up into a seat and an on-screen message told everyone to strap themselves in. The engine roar vibrated the room as the countdown began. Then Mei got a solid kick in the pants as her face felt pinned back into the headrest. Her eyes watered until a braking sensation accompanied by a bang removed some of the pressure on her body. The noise and vibration continued for minutes as Mei remained strapped in. Finally the noise and the pressure stopped. But Mei felt as if she were still travelling as the straps remained fastened. Finally, a minute or two later, the straps were released and normal gravity resumed. Sweat surrounded her headrest. The fatigue caused by last night’s final drinks overpowered her. 

MEI AWOKE TO A PLEASANT hum. She didn’t know how long she had been asleep.

‘Still feeling groggy?’ Alexa had beaten her to it and was already on her feet. Mei wondered whether it was the g-force or the rum hangover which made her nap.

‘Still ok with this? Not thinking about your dad, are you?’

Mei smiled in reply as she propped herself on her elbow.

‘Nah. Just those cocktails last night’. Mei stretched and sat up. ‘That take-off felt real’.

A bunch of shifty-looking strangers surrounded her. Doug, the only person outside her home she vaguely knew, stared at her whenever her gaze fell on his pod. Science fiction was his idea of small talk. He didn’t know any real science. That was a pretext to halt conversation with him. The first time Mei pretended she was feeling unwell, blaming the comedown from the lift-off. Then she claimed it was the helical structure around their module which was mimicking artificial gravity. The twisting motion was making her mind and stomach reel.

Dorky Doug handed her some anti-nausea drugs: ‘Don’t worry. There isn’t any artificial gravity. That’s only for the real spaceships. We haven’t left Earth’.

After twenty-four hours of wonder, the sub-Pacific routine of six months’ confinement set in. Music blared, cafeteria board games abounded, dumbasses laughed too loud, and hide-and-seek in the narrow fern-clad passageways became so popular that there was a list to play. Friendship and intimacy with the others were either fostered or avoided by the distraction of games. Hide-and-seek made everyone interchangeable. Mei was feeling old for 22.

Mei spent most of her time with Alexa. They shared the kitchen, negotiating with the neighbouring pods with cutlery. It could be left out while you were eating. But beyond that was imposing. The floors were impregnated with a mild stench. After a month Alexa was barred from using the kitchens on the other seven levels. Besides, after that time, the novelty had worn off. Mei like most of the others remained on her floor. This trip to Mars was not proving much of an adventure at all. If anything it felt all too much like Earth, but with no escape from the other people living, sleeping and lurking higgledy-piggledy around them. Maybe this was why Mei’s dreams became so weird. She had the same nightmare twice. She, along with Alexa and Kerstin, got decompressed. They were explosively pushed out of the tin can. They saw the rest of the ship kick in its safety interlocks as it fell from view in a weird sunny haze. All three of them drifted as if in folded space. But they were breathing and alive.

THIRTY MILLION MILES away, an unending sunny haze peered in on Maddox’s year-long dayshift. Maddox thought he was smart. But now he had outsmarted himself. Length was going to be the trade-off for getting all of the light shift., and the greater chance of danger. Now the gamble had backfired. There was an airleak in the Lyman agro-tunnel. Normally he hated overtime on top of long year of sentry duty. But seeing his friend being assigned to the same mission gave him a chance to trade. Maddox had a pouch of smuggled cocaine in his breast pocket which he was now having to manouevre into his Montsuit without the officer noticing. Nacho gestured to help but Maddox handled the bloated anti-acid suit and oxygen mask with ease. He watched his friend’s face turn into a mouse as he tightened his mask over his temple and jaw. He followed Maddox, fumbling his legs into his tent-like suit, Nacho struggling to stretch out the length. But he soon copied Maddox’s arms into sleeves with a belaboured crucifixion stretch of his own. Then they zipped themselves into their outer layer until they looked like walking tents. Two storm doors opened and they shuffled into the tunnel in companiable silence.

All looked normal. No violent draught assaulted them, sunlight streamed onto the assorted plants, and detectors registered nothing unusual. The militiamen inched forwards, stopping at each sun canopy to check for infiltration from the amber sea raging outside. Nothing. They checked their detectors, turned them on and off. Still the same reading. Maddox went to the wall meter which measured outside conditions. The hot permanent hurricane five metres beyond the tunnelled-out basalt read normally. So did the mix of carbon dioxide, sulfur and argon. That fierce hell was reduced to a few altered digits, all ticking along unchanged. Maddox led by example. He pulled off his right glove, speculating how a sulfur scar on his hand might be the right image for his real job. But he felt nothing. The mask now. Gesturing to Nacho he took it off. He inhaled mostly nitrogen, some traces of argon and carbon dioxide, but almost 21% oxygen. The raging Venus atmosphere had not penetrated the Earth-like environment of the agrotunnel. Nacho took his mask off, too, grinning in relief.

‘Now’s as good a time as any’, Maddox smiled. He pushed his sulfur hand under his protective suit. A brief look of dismay flowed over Nacho’s face, as if Maddox was about to flash his knife. But it was a brown pouch which he held out in trade.

Nacho’s eyes smiled greedily. He looked destined for failure in life. But his arms did not move. He had an expectant look. His mom was ill, after all. Nacho pleaded. Maddox shuffled his mask back on. He brushed imaginary dust from his suit, and walked downcast towards the exit. Who cared if he was being cheap? Nacho had no leverage.

The militiamen strolled back to the storm doors, and let the awkwardness flow out into the forecourt. Every deal was a potential fuck-up. A bashful gaze met them from the other side. It was a painfully thin man with a lugubrious expression suggesting a life of endless woe.

‘Any problems?’, the officer said. He did not look surprised or curious.

As Maddox and Nacho removed their protection, the officer sealed the doors shut.

A message across the entrance said Controlled by Royal Decree.

MEI HAD STARTED TAKING the ten-minute daily news feed for granted. It was the only communication beamed in from the outside world. If nothing else, it marked time, giving structure to the endless days of playing, cooking, water-rationing and gossiping. But this feed lasted longer. When Tyler’s face appeared on screen, Mei wondered whether she had completely lost track of time and was going to climb out of the hatch. Tyler had a cheapskate smile, the same one that had rejected requests for zero-G simulations before the start of the experiment. Now he was announcing the curtailment of the simulation by one month. Funding had run out. But the planned protocol would be followed. The same g-force descent, same charter flight to Phoenix, blacked-out buses from the airport and then astronaut quarantine at home, extended an extra month.

Astronaut quarantine gave Mei an excuse not to visit her mom. Mother Hoi would doubtless gloat at Psychworld’s incompetence and her daughter’s foolishness. Her five months in a tin can had not made her miss her parental home. That house remained frozen in time, like a time capsule marking the name change Hoi did for her daughter in the wake of the loss of the 2,000 colonists. Why did Mei’s dad have to go to space? Why did the very worst that could possibly happen happen? Mei’s simulation hadn’t given her any insight into what her dad went through. Being cooped up with her roommates felt like being stuck at home, only with a greater density of idiots to resist punching. But it was her tin can and her life. She didn’t want to feel obliged to explain the lack of poignancy to her mom. She didn’t want to give her more ammunition of bad spirits, or any chance to launch a lecture on what the woman down the street thought of Mei’s silliness.

After the blacked-out buses dropped them home in the middle of the night, Kerstin’s face struck Mei’s line of sight as she switched on the living room light. Her puffy skin had got worse in the simulation. She had smuggled a plastic bottle of tequila on board. Nobody knew how she managed to do that. She shared it with Mei and Alexa and was down to her last quarter. But when they got home she accused her roommates of stealing it. Only they shared the access code to her locker and Kerstin had found her bottle all squashed. She didn’t say how much they were supposed to have drunk, or how anyone was supposed to have sneaked to her locker when they were all strapped in for the landing simulation. If they had squashed the bottles, shouldn’t they have finished the lot? But Kerstin only rolled her eyes. The subtle turn at the corner of her mouth implied she was not being serious. Mei found some chili paste and mixed it with her rice noodles, creating a volcanic intensity to lift her spirits.   

‘The internet’s gone weird’, Alexa said. It was the first thing she had said after two minutes of furious scrolling. Her emails and automated responses would stack half-way to the Moon.

All chat and streaming was down. Before the flight to the Pacific they had been told to observe a media blackout. Don’t register on any site. Don’t comment. Don’t leave any online traces. But now they were back home connectivity had not improved much. Mei had started writing things down, as though she was stuck in a time capsule. First scraps of paper, then a notepad which turned into her diary.

‘Weird, how?’, Mei replied while scrolling through her good luck messages.

‘Keeps showing the same old stuff. Then it cuts out’.

‘Maybe the landlord’s fucking with us’, Mei yawned. Quarantine life was tiresome. Email was working fine but everything else kept freezing. The TV was the only thing that worked properly. She felt groggy after the landing simulation and then jaded under this virtual house arrest. But there was also something liberating about crappy internet. Her mom’s calls dropped each time Mei answered. But she always tried. Past experience taught Mei that ignoring her messages only prompted even more demanding requests for an answer, along with worries that her only child had been kidnapped and held for ransom.

The swimming pool, mercifully preserved in their long absence, was a luxury most of the other 200 quaranteners lacked. Psychworld had not finished painting the wall. Piles of unpaid bills still clogged the mailbox, but the women had their pool. It saved them from insanity. Once they were allowed out again they were only supposed to mix with other Psychworld astronauts in public spaces. The mall was the only place they could go for weeks. They were not allowed any drone taxis but Mei had her car. It seemed weirdly brand-new. The streets looked fresher and emptier. Old copies of magazines remained stacked in stands as they faded in the sun. Nobody had wanted them, so nobody had thought to replace them. The mall seemed eerily different. People kept their distance, as if tipped off about the astronaut quarantine.

‘Hey, catch!’. Alexa threw Mei a can of soda. ‘Wasn’t that one your favourite? They must have brought it back for some reason’.

Mei flinched. But she caught the can in time. Being out in public after five months indoors had left her on edge. ‘Thanks, buddy’. Mei iris-scanned the payment, her mind elsewhere. ‘I’m going to check on my mom. Wanna come with?’

After dropping Alexa at home, Mei took the forlorn drive to her silent mother. She might at least have waved from her front window. The glass separation would have respected the quarantine. Or she could have hologrammed herself into Mei’s car. But all Mei could make out was an unresponsive woman sitting in her usual chair in her front room. The front yard was defiantly clean, and the whole house looked fresher. The tidiness indicted Mei’s lengthy absence, along with the dropped calls. Hoi was winning the stubbornness contest. Her silence was impressive even by her own crazy standards. Mei remained long enough with the engine running to make it obvious that it was her, and that she had returned from the Tuvalu tin can in one piece. Then she drove off.

MADDOX LEFT NACHO AND found a bar. He could have gone straight home, but there wasn’t much to go home to. He had been to all six bars on Maxwell. They were remarkable in being identical. But new ferns were trickling down the wall. And Maddox looked different, too, in Monter militia uniform. It gave him different looks, as if they saw him pondering higher things. The barman gave him eggnog, the sort of drink that was only ever offered for free.

‘The eggnog is on the house’.

Not interested. If Maddox wanted eggs he would boil the damn things himself. No, he needed a beer and a think. He hardly smoked at all now. When he started dealing he got through a quarter-ounce a week. But the militia were onto him: did he smoke, how much did he drink, was there any history of psychiatric problems in his family? Maddox could not really answer the last question. But he suspected there was. Now he stuck only to booze. He had tried drugs and it had done nothing for him except give him sweaty palms and arrhythmic drumming in his head. A drink helped him think.

Two women glanced at him. Maddox adopted a brooding look. Nothing much was happening in his brain. This was the first time he had been told to do anything on militia duty. Why him? Who had reported the airleak? Why was he told just to stand down? And what was the old king decreeing exactly? Militia service was supposed to be boring, and everything was supposed to make sense. Everybody faffed around on shift, then went home pretending they had something more interesting to go home to. The planet kept revolving clockwise ever so slowly on its axis.

The two women were leaving. He lifted his glass and drained it, savoring the taste and trying to look mysterious. As they walked past Maddox recognised one of them from school six years before. She used to call him pizza face and mimic his orphan walk as her friends cracked up. Maddox muttered ‘bitch’ and made for the station. The last train was almost always empty. A short walk took him past an empty promenade. Bags of basalt were heaped at the corner. Free miners were doing their bit to sculpt the Mont above.

Maxwell was quiet, not the place where things were happening, or at least when things were happening when Maddox normally finished militia duty. Happening stuff was his perk, a reason to be away from his remote home on the Mont. But now the promenade lay languid. The sacks of debris cast silhouettes that reached almost to the platform edge. The train trundled and sighed into view. Maddox boarded, sat, and pressed his cheek into his palm. Chill air conditioning dried the sweat on his neck. News tapered under the roof about the landworkers staying on strike. Everything was stopped apart from fish and banana. But his gaze upwards at the news only tired his eyes. He closed them and pressed his face against the window. Dark basalt cloaked his face. Occasional flashes of sunlight flitted over his eyelids. His uniform gave him free travel, and a shield to deflect any inquiries about a dozing young man. The steps from the last station on the Mont belonged to the miners and to him. But the miners had finished tunnelling here weeks ago. Since then, Maddox had been the only passenger alighting at his stop. Abandoned machinery and steep cones of tailings lay strewn.

When he reached home, he saw the light on in the atrium. The light was never on, unless they had guests. And Maddox couldn’t remember the last time they had guests.

‘Dad?’

Maddox peered into his living room. It was empty, no furniture, no oxygen, nothing. The acid-plant was still there, turning brown. Maddox had tired of explaining how drowning it with water only made it deader than dead. Nothing could remove the sulfuric acid from its leaves and soil. He went to the kitchen. The same. Cupboards were there, but the food and utensils were all gone. ‘Dad!’, he shouted with urgency. He ran upstairs. His room was empty. Then his own room. Weirdly everything there was in place.

‘Dad!’

He realised he had now addressed the absent man as ‘dad’ more times than he had ever done face-to-face. Absence had promoted his stepdad.

Maddox doubled back, walked wide-eyed across the landing, and peered through the external window. The amber sea flowed indifferently. Lightning flashed through the haze. That restless, unattainable atmosphere glowered like the contents of their absent cooking pot. He stood steady, as if alert to footsteps in a tunnel, overwhelmed by ill-focused thoughts. He waited an hour, and it was a bad hour. Was he coming back, and where could he have gone? Had they been busted? The telex. Of course. Maddox went to the passage with the side-hatch and worked through the messages. Third down, one of them confirmed his worst fears. He slouched against the wall, wide-eyed and stunned. ‘Mars?’, he uttered helplessly. He slouched for ages, giving up hope for tonight. Then he stooped towards his room, crawled into his bed, still wearing his militia uniform, hugged his familiar pillow, and fell asleep.

ANOTHER DROPPED CALL with her mom resigned Mei to a passive flop on the sofa.

‘We’ve got the quarantine debrief’, Kerstin said as she slumped on the sofa next to Mei.

‘Hmm?’

‘That Tyler dude. The one with the cringey smile on Tuvalu’.

‘Oh’.

The Psychworld symbol hologrammed into the sitting room. The green-tick ‘Accept’ icon was triggered by Kerstin’s fist-bump. Tyler frazzled into view. It was odd to see him casually use twenty-first century technology after all the sermons about the evils of the twenty-first century during the interviews back at the Phoenix Hilton.

‘Thanks for taking the call ladies. Luckily we don’t need to mimic the four-minute delay for Mars now, seeing as you’re all safely back home’.

Mei yawned and scrolled through more of her messages from before Tuvalu.  With all the money they splashed out reclaiming a submerged island you would think they could afford laser communications for Mars anyway.

‘Wait, we’re missing one. Is Alexa there, too?’

Mei saw her curler-haired best friend wave away her stare. Then Alexa split her middle and index fingers into two legs and alternated them forward and back in the direction of the front door.

‘Oh, sorry, Tyler, she went out’.

‘That’s OK, ladies. As long as it’s just out, not out out. The astronaut quarantine’s a huge part of this experiment’. His cheesy smile hovered above the sofa a second more than was comfortable.

‘Anyway, now for the lecture part’.

Kerstin sighed. Not a-fucking-gain, she whispered. There was a faint smell of alcohol on her breath.

‘The future of Mars colonization can no longer be left to isolated scientists. It needs whole communities. They need to live, reproduce, and unfortunately die there ...’ Tyler smiled warmly in a way that was at odds with his solemn description of the future. ‘Earth is doomed the way it is going. We want to move thousands, maybe one day millions, of young people like you to a new planet, to a new home’.

His smile continued, full of the vindicated self-assurance of the offline word. ‘Robots have become like people, and people are worth less than robots. People are left with a debt timebomb and environmental catastrophe. Space is our future. And you could be some of the lucky ones’.

Mei did not break her stare. Was she supposed to blush or say ‘wow’ at this point? She hadn’t expected